ABSTRACT
Two themes have dominated Russian historiography in the West during the last two decades: the origins of the Revolutions of 1917 and the alternatives to them. This chapter aims to clarify somewhat the state of our knowledge of Russian liberalism and suggests some reasons for the subordinate role it played in the intellectual, political, and social history of Imperial Russia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Liberalism was advocated to achieve an escape from governmental authority, under all circumstances, regardless of the means used or the proposed alternative program. In the domain of economic policy, legalistic liberalism meant the guarantee of individual property rights, the freedom of economic activity. The difficulty of separating economic-social legalistic liberalism from an active, radical political program plagued the Russian intellectual leadership as well. Liberalism has never been a very precise and clearly defined ideology or philosophic concept, even in the West.
